In recent years, many apparatuses, including navigation systems, audio systems and air-conditioners, have been mounted to automotive vehicles; a problem has been that a driver finds it troublesome to watch a display of a manipulation screen and to manipulate buttons in operation of such apparatuses, thus causing eye movement to increase.
The improvement that has been made is to employ a gesture. An apparatus has been proposed in which for instance, a hand shape and a hand motion are detected as a shape gesture and a direction gesture, respectively, by a camera; a manipulation mode is selected by a first gesture; and a parameter in the manipulation mode is varied by a second gesture (e.g., Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication 2001-216069 and Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication 2005-50177).
In the use of such apparatuses, a problem has been that, as the number of apparatuses and operational objects increase, hand shapes and hand motions each corresponding thereto increase, thus increasing the burden of a user learning of many gestures.
Furthermore, when a gesture is detected using a camera image, ambient environment such as brightness significantly affects accuracy in detection. In particular, the ambient environment in an automotive vehicle varies greatly; thus, another problem has been that the gesture is difficult to detect with high accuracy at all times.